Esther Duflo is a French economist, currently the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT. She is also co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Her major research focus is on Development economics, with an emphasis on health, education, gender and politics, and provision of credit. Together with Abhijit Banerjee, Dean Karlan, Michael Kremer, John A. List, and Sendhil Mullainathan, she has been a driving force in advancing field experiments as an important methodology to discover causal relationships in economics. You can download some of her co-authored research papers here
In this TED video Esther Duflo says it’s possible to know which development efforts help and which hurt — by testing solutions with randomized trials.